TREENA MIELKE/On The Other Side
I lost my mail key a while ago and almost went into my own little personal panic attack, because I was sure that the cheque I had been promised really was in the mail.
I will believe anything, it seems!
But, by the time I went through all my pockets where I find things — things like lost keys and, once even a crumpled $5 bill — it didn’t really matter anymore.
The strike was official.
Apparently the lockout is over now, so I will have to accelerate my search for the lost key, which I’m sure is somewhere. And, once again I will make the daily journey of about 100 steps across the road to ‘check the mail.’ My cheque, no doubt, will be in the mail, and not in the mailbox ready to be plucked out by my anxious little fingers for a long time to come.
How fair is that?
It is no wonder that checking the mail seems to have slipped way down the chain of priorities since the advent of high-speed communication tools such as e-mail.
E-mail is quick, efficient and cheap.
And they are a great way to procrastinate.
There is no way that I, even though my cheque is several weeks late, would trot out to my mail box to check the mail a hundred times a day.
Not so with my email.
I check it when I’m bored, I check it when I should be working and I check it for both those reasons and then, sometimes, for no reason at all.
Anyway, I, who am rather computer-challenged, mastered the art of email quite well when someone who, no doubt, got tired of checking their email all the time, introduced texting.
Texting is also fast, easy and, on top of all that, cheap. Texting says everything that needs to be said with short, choppy words and spelling is not a priority.
Texting is quick and fun but should not be done while driving.
Texting, for me, however was a challenge not to be mastered without a great deal of moaning and lots of complaining.
“It’s too hard, I don’t know how to do it, I don’t want to know how to do it,” I muttered, but then one day my seven-year old granddaughter texted me this little note. ‘I love you, grandma,’ she texted.
“How cool,” I thought. “I’d better learn how to text. And, despite my right thinking brain and my resistance to learning new stuff, I did!
But, now even as I move slowly but surely into the age of emails, E-readers, IPhones and Blackberries, and actually do know how to text, I still wonder about that cheque.
And if it is really in the mail!